We have had in our own history the instance of an embargo, when all our merchant ships were kept at home and forbidden to embark in foreign commerce. That measure was intended to save our commerce from insult and our sailors from impressment. This was done by Act of Congress. I am not aware of any instance, in our own history or in the history of any other country, where there has been a suspension of commercial relations with any foreign power, unless as an act of war. The moment war is declared, there is, from the fact of war, a suspension of commercial relations with the hostile power. Commerce with that power is impossible, and there can be no contract even between the citizens or subjects of the two powers. But this is war. It is now proposed to do this same thing and to call it peace. The proposition is new, absolutely new. Not an instance of history, not a phrase in the Law of Nations, sanctions it. I need not say how little congenial it is with the age in which we live. The present object of good men is to make war difficult, if not impossible. Here is a way to make war easy. To the President is given this alarming power. In Europe war proceeds from the sovereign: in England, from the Queen in Council; in France, from Louis Napoleon. This is according to the genius of monarchies. By the Constitution of our Republic it is Congress alone that can declare war. And yet by this bill One Man, in his discretion, may do little short of declaring war. He may hurl one of the bolts of war, and sever the commercial relations of two great powers. Consider well what must ensue. Suppose the bolt is hurled at England. All that various commerce on which so much depends, all that interchange of goods which contributes so infinitely to the wants of each, all that shipping and all those steamers traversing the ocean between the two, all the multitudinous threads of business by which the two peoples are woven together, warp and woof, as in a mighty loom,--all these must be severed. The next power conferred on the President is like unto the first in its abnormal character. It is nothing less than authority, in his discretion, to make reprisals, by seizing innocent foreigners happening to be in the United States. The more this is considered, the more it must be regarded with distrust.